Statement at Hearings before the U.S.

Trade Deficit Commission

by Milton Friedman
..
November 15,1999
I am pleased to have an opportunity to testify on the causes and consequences

of trade deficits .
The world is currently experiencing the effects of two major revolutions of
the past few decades: a technological revolution that is transforming the way the
world does business, and a political revolution sparked by the fall of the Berlin
Wall in 1989 and the Deng reforms in China starting in 1977.
The technological revolution in computers, telecommunications, and related
industries has made it possible for an enterprise to be located almost anywhere in
the world, produce goods and services almost anywhere in the world, and distribute
its products almost anywhere in the world. As that possibility unfolds it will
greatly strengthen and widen the existing global economy. The political revolution
reinforces the effect of the technological revolution, by greatly expanding the
supply of low-cost yet not low-quality labor available to the global economy,
discrediting central planning, and raising the appeal of market mechanisms.
Taken together, these two revolutions offer the opportunity of a major
economic revolution comparable to the industrial revolution that started 200 years
ago. The industrial revolution produced a greater increase in world output in the
past 200 years than in the preceding two thousand. The information revolution
under way has the potential of repeating that remarkable achievement.
We are now seeing the first stages of the major restructuring of worldwide
production and trade that will be produced by the information revolution. . Capital-
intensive activities--human capital as well as physical capital-- are moving to the
center of the technological revolution, so far largely in the United States but soon
to include Europe and Japan -- and labor-intensive activities are moving to
underdeveloped countries, including the former Soviet satellites in East Europe,as
well as China, and India. Free trade in goods, services, and capital is by far the
most effective way to expedite a worldwide transformation that promises a major
improvement in human well-being around the world.

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 In the process, deficits and surpluses in balances of payments are
unavoidable. The countries to which capital is moving will have balance of
payments deficits - the opposite face of a capital surplus - financed by. . countries.
whose internal savings are larger than can be absorbed in domestic activities that
yield a competitive rate of return. Such deficits, far from being a burden, are an
essential ingredient in the adjustment process. The remarkable performance of the
U. S. economy in the past few years would have been impossible without the inflow
of foreign capital -- the mirror image of large balance of payments deficits.
California is a splendid example. If balance of payments figures were
available for California alone, they would show that California has experienced a
steady stream of deficits for decades on end just as the U.S. on a whole did in the
last half of the nineteenth century. California has grown far more rapidly than
most of the rest of the country. If California enterprises had been forced to rely on
the savings of California citizens alone, it could never have financed its rapid
growth. That was possible because capital was moving from the East to the West
to benefit from the higher rates of return that were attainable in California. It
was possible because California was experiencing large and continuous balance of
payments deficits.
Ignorance is sometimes bliss. Imagine the public reaction if the Los Angeles
Times and the San Francisco Chronic/e were to come out with headlines reading
‘California Faces a Multibillion Deficit in Payments to Rest of Country.” Could
Sacramento have refused to respond in some way?
As an empirical economist, I very much welcome detailed government
statistics on almost anything including international trade, yet as a political
economist and citizen, I often sympathize with my old teacher at the University of
Chicago, Lloyd Mints. who contended that U.S. trade policy would be far better if,
like California, the U.S. had no such data.
Given that we do have such data and are likely to have more rather than less,
the only alternative is to try to educate the public on the merits of free trade in
goods, in services, and in capital. Your commission will, I am sure, make an
important contribution to that objective.,